How We Live Now

June 15, 2020
Hayes continues journaling about and photographing life in New York City, this time from quarantine. In his latest, the author offers a slim, touching volume of jottings and images from his experience of the pandemic from the apartment he shared with his partner, the late Oliver Sacks. A recent New York Times article entitled "Publishers Snap Up Corona Books, From Case Studies to Plague Poetry" warned that "publishing books about an unfolding calamity, when the duration and outcome remain uncertain, carries obvious risks for authors and publishers." With that in mind, Hayes' sweet and searching record of life in March and April seems a bit like a work in progress. His chart "57 Days in the Pandemic in the United States of America" ends on May 7, with "1,292,623 confirmed & 76,928 dead." Of course, since then, those numbers have risen precipitously--and promise to do so even more by the time the book is published. The photos serve as potent documentation of an unprecedented time: empty subway trains and stations at rush hour, for example, or portraits of masked store owners and delivery drivers, or solitary figures roaming the streets. The author includes pre-pandemic images for contrast: A colorful picture of a packed 8th Avenue in December, illuminated by brake lights and neon, contrasts sharply with a black-and-white image of the same corridor on April 6, its skyscraper canyons empty of all but shadows. The text is less dramatic though engaging and personable enough. The author's firsthand intersections with the virus are limited to a couple of sick acquaintances and the effect of social distancing on a nascent love affair begun in December. A list poem recalling "The last time I..." did and saw any number of once-mundane things feels like an homage to Joe Brainard's I Remember. Excellent photos and unassuming journal entries preserve the emotions and sights of the early stages of a pandemic.

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June 22, 2020
In this somber reflection, author and photographer Hayes (Insomniac City) chronicles life in New York City during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hayes’s question perfectly sums up the times: “What if I looked out and saw no cars at all? Not one. As if every last person in Manhattan were taken by this pandemic, except for me, standing alone up here.” Images of empty streets and subways, when juxtaposed with Hayes’s recollections—mostly of romances and amusing encounters with other New Yorkers—make for a startlingly potent contrast and show how abruptly life shifted from the pre-coronavirus world to the “new normal” of today. Hayes captures acts of kindness during the pandemic: shopkeepers providing for their community, medical personnel on break or in training, and a woman making a mandala. The volume also provides an occasion for reflection, “In the enforced solitude and silence, you can sometimes hear yourself replaying moments in your life, things said or not said, done or not done, love expressed or not expressed, all the gratitude you’ve ever received, all the gratitude you’ve ever felt.” Hayes’s photos movingly capture a fraught and frightening moment in history.

July 1, 2020
Completed in early May of this year, Hayes' (Insomniac City, 2017) latest is an achingly timely and moving portrait, in words and photographs, of New York City during the current global COVID-19 pandemic. Describing himself as "a loner and an introvert (except when it comes to strangers)," Hayes has long celebrated the beauty of New York and its people in his street photography (previously gathered in How New York Breaks Your Heart, 2018). Interspersed among journal-like chapters, he shares new photos, some of which are before-and-afters: a busy, brake-lit 8th Avenue in December 2019, precedes a black-and-white image from the same vantage point, the street deserted, in April of this year; a June 2019 photo of a city stoop overflowing with Pride revelers is followed by a stark image of a woman sitting alone in March 2020. Mourning his and his city's giant losses and expressing melancholy for what may never be again, Hayes also finds joy in surprising things, like cooking for himself and joining a "metaphorical bread line" outside his favorite bookshop, and in sweet, affectingly related memories.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)